Few scholarly inquiries have been dedicated to the influence of political commitment on activists'' children. This is especially true in relation to feminist activists and their children. This paper contends that working on this specific kind of activism – a feminist commitment seeking to question gender roles, norms and traditional separation between the public and private spheres – provides a new outlook on political socialization, its contents and mechanisms in an intergenerational perspective. To illustrate this proposition, I draw on a case study of women who took part in the French women''s liberation movement in the 1970s, and their children. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the research consists of a survey with feminist veterans and matched in-depth interviews of these women and their children. The paper first introduces components of the legacy of feminists’ children. It argues that while conventional political traits emphasized in the existing literature – such as partisanship, ideology, or level of political participation – are present in this legacy, other specific dispositions related to feminist commitment can also be observed. I then proceed to consider the way in which the traits of this legacy have been passed down to children. In this respect, I analyze the kind of mechanisms supporting the political socialization process which can be found in feminists veterans'' families, and whether it consists in explicit practices and/or implicit vehicles. Finally, in order to tease out factors enhancing intergenerational continuities, the paper suggests hypotheses to explain why feminist legacies are more strongly transmitted in some families than in others. It argues that the transmission conditions are notably related to the characteristics of mothers’ feminist careers. These points are discussed in light of the initial results of my case study.
